Mobile Applications

VCE, a highly successful company conceived by EMC, Cisco Systems, Intel and VMware five and half years ago, made news May 4 at EMC World 2015 here by announcing a new line of hyper-converged data center systems called VxRacks. The company said these new server-storage packages will enable enterprises and service providers to more easily manage the deployment of next-generation scale-out cloud, distributed and mobile Tier 2 applications.

VCE VxRack systems enable users to start with dozens of servers and scale to thousands with up to 38 petabytes of storage capacity while delivering high performance/value per IOP. Most importantly, VCE offers its proven methodology of pre-engineered, preconfigured factory-built infrastructure with single-call lifecycle support to VxRack Systems, providing owners with the same VCE customer experience...

South River Technologies, Inc. (SRT), an innovator in secure file transfer, has announced the launch of its WebDrive mobile app for iPhone and iPad applications. WebDrive is designed to make accessing files on a multitude of cloud services and corporate web servers more convenient and efficient.

WebDrive for iOS enables users to access all of their files, presentations and videos through one simple app, rather than requiring an application for each storage service. This creates a simple way for users to access, share and view all of their content...

Microsoft has taken the wraps off updates for two of its customer-facing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products: Outlook Web App and Skype for Windows Phone 8. Outlook Web App, the enterprise-focused version of its Outlook.com cloud email service, now sports a delegate access configuration feature. Even though you're off having a good time, it's still business as usual in the office. The feature allows users to give permission for others to check their inbox and manage their calendar while they are away.

In a blog post introducing the delegate access feature for Outlook Web App, three members of the Office 365 team wrote: “Let’s say you're about to go on vacation and ... you've decided to turn work email off on your phone and leave your laptop at home for this trip...

Domo, a new software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that is redefining the business intelligence (BI) market, is making waves with executives across all industries for its mobile app. Available via the iTunes Store, Domo's mobile app works the way its customers do.

Josh James, Domo founder and CEO, says, "Users have been conditioned to believe that mobile applications are less functional than desktop apps. At Domo, we believe that mobile should outperform what the desktop experience delivers. From the beginning, we've focused on completely resetting expectations. In addition to making our mobile app on par with our desktop application, we're adding new capabilities that deliver a surprisingly more insightful, intuitive and user-friendly experience."...

Mobile and desktop devices tend to be thought of as distinct things, but the boundaries between them have blurred considerably in recent years. It's not just that devices can share data through cloud services and can run virtual machines. It's that we're starting to treat devices as interfaces for computing, rather than computers themselves. Our devices may be capable of handling local computation, but that's becoming a separate consideration. Parallels Access, a new app for iPad, exemplifies this trend. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Parallels made a name for itself creating software to let Mac users run Windows.

Access allows iPad users to run applications on remote OS X and Windows computers through Apple's tablet. Sorry, no Android. There's plenty of software that provides computer-to-computer remote access, such as Chrome Remote Access, TeamViewer and VNC. And mobile devices can do this too, through apps like LogMeIn Ignition...

Incidents of international cyberespionage, attacks on financial institutions and intellectual property thefts help maintain a steady stream of news about information security. Passwords and logins are not the raw material of headline grabbing stories, but they are the security issues IT professionals must face daily. The rise in adoption of cloud computing, Software as a Service (SaaS) and mobile computing has increased the complexity of managing users and their identities.

Security practitioners have spent decades developing methods for strong authentication to mitigate these risks that are easy to use and as secure as possible. Single sign-on (SSO) systems allow users to authenticate to a central application one time and then automatically authenticate to other applications and systems...

Forrester released the data of its annual survey on IT spending worldwide and detects areas with higher spending, including apps and tablets. Forrester Research annual report on worldwide IT spending split the amount of 2.06 trillion dollars spent this year from businesses and governments between hardware, software and services related to information technology world. CIOs and IT decision-makers plan their biggest software spending increases in mobile applications and middleware, analytics, security, and collaboration software.

Software registered largest share of tech spending in 2013 and companies will continue to spend in this segment particularly on smart and cloud computing in 2014. While investment in legacy applications (both desktop and server) begins to languish, most investment moves towards cloud computing solutions, SaaS solutions development and towards the smart computing, i.e. Big Data and mobile application development...

Mobile apps will be more dependent on cloud computing in the near future. According to a new report by Gartner, by 2016, about 40 percent of mobile application development projects will take on the cloud to function. This is a big consideration for midsize firm IT pros, who are responsible for the security of mobile applications.

The Back-End Services

Gartner's findings, recently featured in Telecomasia, showed that companies will be using cloud mobile back-end services, which use platform as a service (PaaS) technology. Today, successful mobile applications must work well with a set of back-end services that include user management, data storage, and social business functions. However, many mobile application developers may only really understand front-end development on the client side. Through cloud mobile hosted platforms both front and back end development is linked, creating the best type of integration and scalability possible. In fact, some cloud mobile back-end services enable developers to deploy server-side code...

When it comes to the cloud services market, Software as a Service (SaaS) leads the pack. Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research reports that SaaS revenue will far exceed that of Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service (PaaS) in coming years. The firm predicts that SaaS will rake in $92.8 billion by 2016, up from just $21.2 billion in 2011. Driving the trend is increasing demand for mobile SaaS -- SaaS applications that companies access via smartphones and other wireless devices.

Not surprisingly, SaaS vendors are looking for ways to differentiate themselves in the increasingly crowded SaaS applications market. Experts say that more SaaS providers are entering the mobile fray, serving up customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other enterprise-specific mobile apps for a widening customer base...

Mowbly, which recently launched and is here at Disrupt NY, takes a counter approach to mobile development platform environments. Instead of a steady stream of apps, Mowbly uses a single-app approach that it offers through its mobile platform as a service (PaaS), said Co-Founder Vignesh Swaminathan. Mowbly offers third-party app support. But it only processes the data by calling the third party app’s API. Mowbly delivers the data but not the user experience of the app.

At its core is an aggregator that filters data for the customer, employee or partner and presents it through the app. The service has a cross-platform capability, a mobile server for building, managing and deploying apps and a mobile user interface framework. It can be used across multiple mobile platforms and requires no special mobile development skills. It allows IT departments to deploy the apps using browser-based tools rather than hire developers...